During his imprisonment at nine separate concentration camps, including Auschwitz, Abraham Peck expected death to come at any moment. Instead, he lived a full life that came to an end last Thursday at age 91 due to kidney failure, reports the New Jersey Record. The last Jewish survivor from the Polish town of Szadek, Peck was liberated in 1945 before marrying another Holocaust survivor and moving to New Jersey, where he eventually bought an upholstery business. But he was frustrated "that the American citizens he met did not have an inkling of the horrors which Holocaust survivors had experienced at the hands of the Nazis," author Maya Ross wrote in the recent biography Abe-vs-Adolf. "The American Jews didn’t believe us ... the way they killed us, the way they treated us. They didn’t want to hear a word about it. It was too terrible for them to believe so we shut up. I shut up for years.”
That eventually ended, and to raise awareness, Peck began speaking at schools and community functions. He was later invited to talk at colleges across the US and Europe, according to his obituary. "He felt if he survived, he could tell people about the horrors the Nazis perpetrated," his son says. He wanted people "not to stand for any injustice in the world. That was a core piece of his legacy." And though Peck lost 83 of 89 family members in the Holocaust, per the Washington Post—he said the day he watched his father die of pneumonia was the worst of his life—he managed to live a happy life. "I made many good friends and they tell me that I am a nice guy!" he said. (This Holocaust survivor just had a dream come true.)
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